US troops killed about 26 suspected militants in Baghdad's Sadr City on Saturday in one of the fiercest clashes in the Shia stronghold since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Residents of the east Baghdad slum district, a bastion of fiery Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia, said the fighting lasted six hours and involved helicopter-fired missile strikes.
The US military said American forces staged two separate raids into Sadr City targeting militants suspected of close ties to "Iranian terror networks" and who were responsible for bringing Iranian weapons into Iraq. "Coalition Forces killed an estimated 26 terrorists and detained 17 suspected secret cell terrorists during the two operations," a US military statement said. There were no civilian casualties, the US military said separately.
A witness at a Sadr City hospital said nine civilians were wounded. Other residents said several cars were burned and they insisted all the people killed in the clashes were civilians.
Elsewhere, a suicide bomber dressed as a policeman killed at least six people on Saturday when he blew himself up outside a police recruitment centre north east of Baghdad, an Iraqi army source said. The source said 30 people were wounded when the bomber detonated his explosives beside a queue of people waiting to enter the recruitment office. A separate witness said the death toll was much higher from the attack in al-Muqdadiya, 90 km (50 miles) north east of Baghdad.
The US military has launched a major offensive around the capital to crack down on Shia militias and drive out Sunni Islamist al Qaeda fighters. The operations are backed by 28,000 extra American troops ordered to Iraq by US President George W. Bush.
35 BODIES IN MASS GRAVE FOUND The US military said on Saturday it had uncovered 35 to 40 bodies in a mass grave south of Falluja, in Iraq's Sunni dominated Anbar province. A Falluja hospital source said 35 bodies had been retrieved and were being finger-printed to establish their identity. The military said the killings were relatively recent and the bodies had been bound and bore gunshot wounds.
The mass grave was found late on Friday near a place called Ferris, roughly 35 km (22 miles) south of the city of Falluja, after a tip-off from a local, it said.
EGYPTIAN AL QAEDA FIGURE KILLED The US military said on Saturday that its forces had killed an Egyptian man believed to be a senior member of al Qaeda in Iraq on Friday.
The military said in a statement that intelligence reports indicated that Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Masri worked directly for fellow Egyptian Abu Ayyub al-Masri, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. The Sunni militant group is blamed for many of the bloody attacks which have pushed the country to the brink of civil war.
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